Vilros Raspberry Pi 3 Complete Starter Kit with Clear Case and 32GB SD Card

=== High level review ===First off, I love this kit. Quality components all the way through, and their packaging is excellent. However, I want to focus on the SD card provided. There have been a lot of counterfeits going around, which can lead people to have drives that are smaller than advertised or way slower than advertised. I wanted to make sure the SD card provided in my kit was legitimate. If you don't want to read the detailed analysis, it *was* a great SD card. No issues.EDIT: I should point out that the counterfeit problem is definitely NOT particular to a Vilros kit or any other raspberry pi kit. I actually haven't heard of a case yet. However, these counterfeit SD cards are on the SD card marketplace as a whole, and can be distributed to sellers that we may buy from. I just wanted to make sure.=== SD card details ===If you want to replicate this, you'll need a some experience on the command line. The steps will knock out the preloaded NOOBS on the disk -- so you'll need the level of knowledge to either re-install that to the card, or move on without it. Also, *be extremely careful* that you choose the correct disk when we format the disk and when we overwrite the disk. If you don't, you can potentially ruin whatever drive you accidentally chose. Here's the set of logical steps that I took (the commands will differ for different platforms):1) I got a USB SD card reader for my laptop. I was quite pleased with the Anker one I purchased.2) I put my microSD card into its appropriate slot, and then plugged the card reader into my laptop.3) After I made SURE that I had picked the correct device (the device corresponding to my SD card), I reformatted the whole drive in FAT32.4) I downloaded the excellent tool "Fight Flash Fraud" or F3 by Digirati. If you found it as useful as I did, maybe throw a few bucks donation his way.5) I ran f3write on my newly formatted SD card (since we just formatted, we know it is empty). This should write a sequence of 1GB files onto your drive until it can't write anymore. This allows you to see how much memory you can actually write to; the last file may be smaller than 1GB but it will write out the remaining space nonetheless.If you got a counterfeit drive, maybe it only has 8GB of writeable memory when it is packaged in a 32GB casing. f3write also gives you an estimate of the write speed. However, write speeds can fluctuate based on the task, and I found my reported speed in this task to be slightly lower than in some others. The key is that your write speeds should be in the right ballpark -- if they are below the minimum advertised, perhaps even substantially below, you got a bad drive (counterfeit or not).6) I ran f3read on my SD card. This reads the same sequence of 1GB files off of the drive. This validates that the files were actually written correctly (important to defeat some counterfeit SD card tricks), and also gives you the read speed of the drive. Again, this will fluctuate in different circumstances, but it is the rough estimate of the read speed that matters.7) That's it! My drive happened to be in great condition. Delete those files or reformat to FAT32 again, and your drive is ready for NOOBs or an Operating System (OS) to be written onto it.Now, we need to do a bit of homework to figure out what speeds are acceptable. I personally got the kit with a 32GB SanDisk Ultra microSDHC UHS-I Card. Let's go to the manufacturer's website. First, we learn that we need to be a bit careful: there are a few microSDHC cards that have this name. After checking the color of the drives when set to 32GB, I see that I have the 32GB SanDisk Ultra microSDHC for Smartphones / Cameras. Scrolling through the product details, we can learn a few key details:1) We get read speeds of up to 80 MB/s.2) This is a class 10 SD card.3) SanDisk uses MB = 1,000,000 bytes (1000 * 1000) and GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes (1000 * 1000 * 1000).4) Unfortunately, they do not even list a range of possible speeds for writes; they simply say "up to 80MB/sec read speed... ; write speeds lower. Based on internal testing; performance may be lower depending on host device, interface, usage conditions and other factors."Drive manufacturers use smaller units than the actual OS uses when considering disk space and disk transfer speeds, so we need to do a small conversion here. The actual units for storage are instead MB = 1,048,576 bytes (1024 * 1024) and GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes (1024 * 1024 * 1024). So if they advertise 32GB of space, the maximum possible space is actually (32 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / (1024 * 1024 * 1024), which gives us slightly over 29.80GB of actual space. For transfer speed, f3 uses real MB/s so we need to do the conversion. If they advertise up to 80MB/s, the maximum possible transfer speed is ~74.51MB/s. Remember, the actual speeds attained will likely be lower than that.Alright, now we've used most of our information. The last thing to leverage is that it is a class 10 SD card. After googling it, we can find that a UHS-I class 10 SD card "minimum read/write performance of at least 10 MB/s" for sequential read/writes. Most of the ways you'll use the SD card are sequential read/writes, so this is relevant to you -- again, only treat it as an estimate, because real world conditions may not be 100% sequential. Also, because this standard is ratified by SD card companies, let's assume that it needs to be converted to a real ~9.31MB/s (I couldn't find a source that specified their standard for MB, GB).Now that we have an idea of what performance and storage size we should expect, let's review the test results! Here were mine:------$ ./f3write /Volumes/RASPBERRYSD/Free space: 29.71 GBCreating file 1.h2w ... OK!Creating file 2.h2w ... OK!=== snip ===Creating file 28.h2w ... OK!Creating file 29.h2w ... OK!Creating file 30.h2w ... OK!Free space: 0.00 ByteAverage writing speed: 10.24 MB/s$ ./f3read /Volumes/RASPBERRYSD/ SECTORS ok/corrupted/changed/overwrittenValidating file 1.h2w ... 2097152/ 0/ 0/ 0Validating file 2.h2w ... 2097152/ 0/ 0/ 0=== snip ===Validating file 28.h2w ... 2097152/ 0/ 0/ 0Validating file 29.h2w ... 2097152/ 0/ 0/ 0Validating file 30.h2w ... 1483040/ 0/ 0/ 0 Data OK: 29.71 GB (62300448 sectors)Data LOST: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors) Corrupted: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors) Slightly changed: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors) Overwritten: 0.00 Byte (0 sectors)Average reading speed: 66.17 MB/s------We can see that 29.71GB of free space was advertised, and it was able to successfully write to all of that 29.71GB. All of the sectors were okay, which is what you want. You might be wondering why 29.71GB if the full size was 29.80GB? There are some other things that need to be kept track of in order for your OS to interact with the SD card correctly. This explains the small difference between this sizes. Additionally, we see that the average read speed was 66.17MB/s, which is definitely respectable. And we also see the write speed was 10.24MB/s, which is respectable. All in all, success!

This thing is really cool! I bought the Raspberry Pi 3 with the idea of controlling accessories on a model train layout. While it will do what I need it to do with the aid of some hats (external plug-in boards), I've found that I like it for surfing the web, watching You Tube and checking e-mails. It comes with other programs too, such as a pretty nice media player and video games. I'll have to buy another one for the train as it's a lot of fun to experiment with this one.It's easy to get it up and running. Just follow the directions in the enclosed book. It doesn't take much skill to attach the heat sinks and put it in he case. No tools required. You'll need a keyboard and mouse with usb connectors. The only other thing you'll need is a monitor or TV with an HDMI input. The HDMI cable and a power supply are included. Run the Noobs installer and there you go. It has built in wifi, or you can run an ethernet cable to it for access to the web. It also has bluetooth for accessories.So, whether you want to just surf the web, or experiment and make cool projects, the Raspberry Pi Starter Kit is well worth the money for the kit itself, not to mention the educational / entertainment value you'll get from it.

not a bad kit... you get everything you need to get started... i like the case, the heatsinks and the power supply... the hdmi cable worked fine... the 32GB offered a Raspian install out of the box (you can get addt'l installs if you configure wifi before installing)...i plugged two cheap 2.4GHz wireless keyboard and mouse adapters into two of the USB ports to do the install... no need for wired USB devices!the Pi 3 has enough horsepower to play video without the need for a hardware license... you *can* overclock this Pi, but you'll need a little simple command-line mojo... however, there's no need to do this... i installed the heatsinks - and despite some opinions out there, i still think it's a good idea to heatsink the networking chip...the power supply and USB voltage management on the Pi 3 provide enough amperage to power my 500GB Toshiba USB drive plugged into the Pi 3 with no problem - w00t!within a hour i had OpenELEC installed on one 16GB Sandisk microsdhc and Raspian 'Jessie' installed on the 32GB Sandisk microsdhc included with this kit... in a few minutes i had vnc service installed, configured and up on the Raspian system, allowing me to run desktop sessions on my Macbook Air through my routervlc and audacious installed quickly and easily... one tip: you may need to run 'sudo raspi-config' to force HDMI audio to avoid fade-in/fade-out audio problems if running audio and video through your HDMI cable to your TV.... slightly annoying until i figured this out - worked for me on my big 50" Viziothis is a Roku and AppleTV KILLER!!! i was so ticked off by the limitations and poor performance of my AppleTV - i'm never going back now!

Entregado antes de tiempo y con excelente calidad. El producto de acuerdo a lo esperado y con excelente servicio en lo general

Excelente servicio, productos de calidad. Llego en el el tiempo establecido y la comunicacion fue constante hasta que recibi el producto.